34% less commission, same revenue
A jewellery brand with a busy affiliate programme and a familiar question: all these publishers are driving sales — but are they actually bringing us customers, or just collecting commission on sales we'd have made anyway?
Vertical
Jewellery
Focus
Fraud & compliance audit
-34%
Commission spend
+41%
ROAS — 25.9x to 36.5x
-21%
Cost per acquisition
The approach
I went through every publisher with traffic in the prior 12 months. For each one, the same questions:
Where does the traffic actually come from?
What does the click-to-conversion pattern look like?
Is any of it incremental — or does the partner only fire at checkout, on customers who had already decided to buy?
By the end of the audit, close to a dozen publishers were exhibiting fraudulent or fraud-adjacent behaviour, most of them flavours of ad-hijacking.
